Online payment company PayPal processed nearly $4 billion worth of mobile payments in 2011, an exponential increase from the previous year.
To put this figure in perspective, the company processed $750 million worth of mobile transactions in 2010 and $141 million in 2009, David Marcus, vice president of PayPal Mobile, said at the Consumer Electronics Show.
The huge growth in mobile payment volume is the result of an overall increase in mobile commerce, combined with the availability of more useful mobile payment apps, Marcus told VentureBeat.
PayPal had originally kicked off 2011 predicting $1.5 billion in mobile total payment volume for the year, a company spokesman said. As the year went on, the company upped its projections three separate times, to $2 billion in February, $3 billion in June, and $3.5 billion in October.
"Over the course of [2011] we raised our initial prediction by a total of $2 billion, and still managed to surpass our goal by a wide margin with a total of $4 billion," a PayPal spokesman said in an email.
PayPal has actually seen mobile payment volumes ratchet up each year since at least 2006, when it processed less than $1 million in mobile transactions. In 2007, it hit $7 million and by 2008, it reached $25 million.
Despite the huge growth in mobile payment volume seen by PayPal, those in the payments industry do not expect the new transaction method to reach ubiquity this year. A group of mobile payment executives in September said consumers will be quicker to embrace mobile payments than merchants, who have been slow to accept such transactions.
Some merchants have been early adopters, however. Starbucks, for example, in July unveiled a new mobile payment system available in all U.S. stores for BlackBerry and Apple iOS users.